Talking about tax: the discursive distance between 38 Degrees and GetUp

ABSTRACT

This paper examines tax justice advocacy (e.g., around multinational corporate tax avoidance) in the UK and Australia between 2010 and 2018 to understand how digital advocacy organizations relate to one another as well as different groups in a shared discursive space. Data from public Facebook pages is analyzed using topic modeling and network analysis, supplemented by interviews with organizational actors. The transnational organizational links between two high-profile digital advocacy organizations – 38 Degrees and GetUp – are not reflected by proximity in the discourse network, which instead displays dominant nationally specific differences around the concepts and corporate targets associated with tax justice advocacy.

KEYWORDS:

• 38 Degrees
• GetUp
• tax justice
• social movements
• topic modeling
• natural language processing
• named entity recognition
• network analysis

Acknowledgments

Thank you for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article from Francesco Bailo, Chao Sun, and attendees at the University of Portsmouth workshop on Understanding and Examining the Digital Advocacy Pioneers.

Declaration of interest statement

There are no interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Vaughan

Michael Vaughan completed his PhD in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney on social movements around international tax justice in Australia and the UK. He is currently an Associate Researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, studying digitalisation and the transnational public sphere.